


Down the rivers of windfall light

by cyan96



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, In which Yuuri is oblivious, Kitsune! Yuri, M/M, Phoenix! Mila, and Viktor is smitten, and yuri is just so fucking done, dragon! viktor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-09-03 04:21:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8696410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyan96/pseuds/cyan96
Summary: “A human,” Yuri observes slowly. Because it is. A human. Dark haired, with fog-dusted glasses and a truly unfortunate number of layers to ward off the autumn chill. He smells vaguely of sea salt: crisp and sharp, the mark of a water mage. Nothing extremely special, otherwise. The closest Yuri explanation can come up with for having been dragged all this way is Viktor deciding to add “Magical humans” to his list of hoard-viable objects. Which, although stupid and a perfect example of Viktor’s terrible life decisions, is still sadly within the realm of his ridiculousness.The noise Viktor makes is—high and floaty, somewhere between a purr and a chirp, deeply pleased, and sounding entirely out of place on a currently house-sized dragon, even one as elegant as Viktor. For a moment Yuri simply stares, the vibrations of it tingling on his spine. And then his brain makes the leapfrog from point A: Viktor’s obscenely cheerful mood to point B: what is that smile what are those dopey eyes Viktor what the fuck—What the actual fuck.“Vitya, that’s a human,” Yuri hisses, whirling, as the whole and appalling picture snaps into place.





	1. Chapter 1

“I have something marvellous to show you,” is the first thing Viktor chirps as he comes swooping down towards the river and Yuri, scales glinting silvery and opalescent in the early morning sun, shrunken down to the size of a small house instead of his usual palace-tall form and sounding entirely too happy for life in general.

After a full two seasons of it, Viktor’s near permanent good mood is beginning to be a pain. Yuri lifts his head from the sun-bleached rock he’d been napping on to blink grouchily at him, noting the swishing tail and the almost jittery excitement. “I’m sleeping,” he snaps back testily. It is too early. Viktor’s excitement is fortunately not contagious, no matter how much of it thrown around.

A blow of cool air ruffles his fur—Viktor, sitting down in the calf-high water, folding his wings. Droplets fly up and splash across the front of Yuri’s muzzle. “This is important, Yura,” he says, a smile in his voice. “We are in the middle of a river. I will push you in, don’t think I won’t.”

“I will bite off your tail if you try,” Yuri growls back, but without heat to it. Viktor will absolutely push him in; he’s pushed Yuri off of everything from canyons to sea-side cliffs to a once and terribly memorable volcano ledge, where Mila had laughed herself sick as he clawed his way out and spent the next two weeks picking bits of solid rock out of his fur. For that, Yuri had made the two of them fly straight into a mountain range.

“Yes, yes,” Viktor says with a sigh.

He doesn’t push Yuri into the river.

What he does instead is worse, because for all his nice smiles and genial manner Viktor is a fucker at heart. He locks his claws in a cradle hold underneath Yuri’s torso, making sure to account for the weight of five gold-furred tails, and then with a mighty leap shoves off the rock even as Yuri strangles a yelp, trying to smack Viktor in the face and failing.

“I hate you,” Yuri growls vehemently, five hundred feet above and the forest a rapidly shrinking field of green, the river a winding ribbon cutting across the fields. He bites down hard on one scaled forearm. Viktor shifts, and the wind buffets cuttingly at Yuri’s eyes.

Struggling when Viktor is like this is futile, Yuri knows from good experience, and not just because the current height is enough for the air to thin, sharp and cold and moist, a curl of cloud cover misting around them. For dignity’s sake he pokes Viktor in the belly once, not hard enough to do damage but enough to hurt, and stays scowling limp for the rest of the ride.

This high up though, the entirety of the mountain range is sprawled underneath him, a tiny painting lit aglow with egg-yolk sun. Their peaks are snow-capped, trailing down to green valleys, cradling lush forests and rolling golden hills. Yakov’s sleeping place rise in the west. Deep rocky canyons. Nothing but the wind for company. Viktor’s winding labyrinth of a home is just a few mountains forward, tunneled into the windward slope with its front entrance constantly fogged by a light drizzle. Yuri's forests, growing red-orange with autumn, all the fruits ripening, sweet and soft and ready for harvest. Far off at its edges a human settlement sleeps. Brightly painted roofs stand stark against the side of a deep lake, and beyond that: crisp air and jagged beauty; the indomitable, breathtaking wilderness.

Viktor spirals them towards the human settlement. He catches an updraft with his wings spread and glides down slowly towards the cover of the fir trees. The moment Yuri touches ground, he whirls and shoots a ball of fire the size of his head at Viktor’s face.

Viktor ducks, swipes his tail upwards. Moisture condenses, a sudden dryness present to the air, and just like that enough water to fill a small pond splashes all over the fire, dispersing into a fine mist before it touches the forest floor.

“Don’t do that again,” Yuri says acidly.

Viktor has the gall to roll his eyes. “It would have taken ages to convince you, Yura.” At Yuri’s snarl, he hooks his tail around Yuri’s shoulders and looks down with his most beseechingly expression, which has not worked on Yuri for the past five hundred years. “He is only there for a little while in the mornings. We’d have missed him otherwise!”

“I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” Yuri informs him.

Still, he grudgingly trots after Viktor as the dragon slips between the trees, paws soft against the moist dark earth and the scatter of decaying leaves underfoot. The forest thins. Yuri can see larger patches of sky overhead. Finally, they reach the boundary, where Viktor settles himself in the tall, unbending grass and motions towards a little hunched figure a ways off.

“Cover me,” he says softly to Yuri, who narrows his eyes but throws a glamour over him anyways. Viktor has absolutely atrocious camouflage here, a huge, bulky pile of glittering stone in the middle of warm browns and pale yellows. Not that the figure does better, bundled in vivid blues and a punch-red scarf going up to cover his mouth. Silhouetted at his back, the town is a strip of haphazardous colours against a pale lake.

“A human,” Yuri observes slowly. Because it is. A human. Dark haired, with fog-dusted glasses and a truly unfortunate number of layers to ward off the autumn chill. He smells vaguely of sea salt: crisp and sharp, the mark of a water mage. Nothing extremely special, otherwise. The closest Yuri explanation can come up with for having been dragged all this way is Viktor deciding to add “Magical humans” to his list of hoard-viable objects. Which, although stupid and a perfect example of Viktor’s terrible life decisions—humans are bad maintenance and they have the shittiest lifespans—is still sadly within the realm of Viktor’s ridiculousness.

He nudges Viktor’s bulk with a tail. The human trundles closer, crouching low to rummage through the dense layer of fallen layers.

The noise Viktor makes is—high and floaty, somewhere between a purr and a chirp, deeply pleased, and sounding entirely out of place on a currently house-sized dragon, even one as elegant as Viktor. For a moment Yuri simply stares, the vibrations of it tingling on his spine. And then his brain makes the leapfrog from point A: Viktor’s obscenely cheerful mood to point B: what is that smile what are those dopey eyes _Viktor what the fuck—_

What the actual fuck.

“Vitya, that’s a _human_ ,” Yuri hisses, whirling, as the whole and appalling picture snaps into place.

Barely deigning to look at Yuri, eyes still glued to the fucking monkey, Viktor says, tone mistily, marvelling entranced, “Isn’t he amazing?”

“What the fuck.” Yuri says, for lack of anything eloquent. “No. No he isn’t. Vitya that’s a human. No.” He smacks all five of his tails against Viktor’s side for emphasis, only for the fucker to barely shift, safely hidden from Yuri’s ire by his thick scales.

The human blinks foggily in their direction. Tilts his head to the side. Yuri hastily slaps up the slipping glamour around himself and Viktor just as he takes a step in their direction and mutters, barely audible. “Huh. Though I heard something.”

Yuri turns to fix Viktor with his most intimidating glare.

“He is amazing,” Viktor says, like he did not hear Yuri at all. “His name is Katsuki Yuuri. He does these performances with water magics. He attends competitions for them and he is one of the best, even if he says he didn’t do too well on the last one. He used to live in that town when he was small before the big cities. He came back two seasons ago.”

When he turns to Yuri, Viktor’s eyes are shining. Bright. Exuberant. The tingling too is back: something slow but powerful, the shift of a tectonic plate churning through the gears, as if Viktor’s joy is overflowing and to the point it is singing into the air around him.

Yuri examines him slowly. Incredulous anger is still a hot red coal in his gut. But Viktor looks so happy. So inspired. The past few decades he had moped listlessly in the mountains, enough to make both Mila and Yakov worry. Yuri had taken it on himself to drag Viktor out to see sun even if he was barely eating, barely looking for new additions to his hoard, sleeping through entire years at a time.

And now the human. _This fucking human._

Barely a full rotation of the earth and he had Viktor looking like he’s back in the frozen tundra of the north. Like he’s riding the great polar currents downhill to the south. Like he is diving deep in the oceanic trenches of the east, fishing out pearls the size of ostrich eggs, laughing and reckless and shining so brightly it nearly hurts to look at him.

Except: “And how exactly,” Yuri says, feeling suspicion dawn in an ugly storm. “Do you know all this?”

“He told me,” Viktor says, in a tone that means he is oblivious to the error in this picture.

“He told you.”

“Yes.”

“How?” Yuri does not actually want to know. He really doesn’t.

He gets to anyways, because twenty seconds later, there’s a huge, silvery furred stag in Viktor’s place, weaving a few experimental circles inside the little area covered by Yuri’s glamour to test his equilibrium. It is rather impressive. For a dragon, anyways. Dragons rarely bother with transformation magics and are mostly bullshit at it—too much precision, not very useful for their kind, too cramped. Viktor is good with shrinking and unfolding himself, but the stag is the smallest Yuri has seen him go. In contrast, transformations were one of the first lessons Yuri was taught, right after the simple illusions, just before foxfire.

Viktor walks straight out, goes up to the human. Yuri resists to urge to set him on fire. Viktor has terrible choices.

It is not as if the human can harm him in any significant way. There are very little beings in this world that can. Viktor is a dragon. Viktor is a genius. Viktor is young and educated and hasn’t lost to anything in centuries.

Still. _Terrible choices._

He nips at the humans hair and the human laughs. Yuri can see their interactions: the human’s comfortable and delighted, Viktor equally delighted, and also nosing around the human’s basket to come up with an apple.

Why.

When the human departs, the sun has risen a good ways, and Yuri is beginning to reach the end of his admittedly short rope of patience. Viktor beams at Yuri as if expecting Yuri to profess his undying love towards the human, and in response Yuri breathes a pillar of flame, a violent crackle of violet and blue, in hopes that Viktor will catch fire and stay on fire.

It takes longer for Viktor to put that one out.

*

He brings the issue up to Mila.

“I know,” says Mila, cracking a huge mollusk on a rock with her talon. “I’ve been trying to teach him how to go human. He is rather bad at it.”

Mila’s nest is held suspended at a precarious wedge on a high cliff above a hidden lake, made up of huge interweaving branches, glittering quartz, and held together through either magic or just superheating. She’s smaller than Viktor. Everyone is smaller than Viktor, except Yakov, who is older than dirt and whose full size would probably span the entirety of the mountain range and be made of the same materials. She’s bigger than Yuri though, all twelve flaming metres of her, and relying on her as support for this was a temporary lapse in Yuri’s sanity. Mila, no doubt, finds this entire situation hilarious.

“Of course he’s bad at it.” Yuri makes a face. “He’s never even tried going bipedal before.”

“I know,” says Mila, and then she snickers, which proves Yuri’s previous assessment. “It’s sweet.”

“It is a human,” Yuri finds the need to point out.

Mila plucks the flesh from the mollusk and drops it into her beak. The shell of it is dark grey, cobbed with algae. “At least he’s not going the traditional way,” she offers, tone amused. “They never last long cooped up.”

“So he’s doing it the traditional human way instead,” he says flatly.

Mila cocks her head. “Well, that’s one way to look at it.”

*

In the end, the fact is: nobody can make Viktor do anything he doesn’t want to once his mind is set. God knows that Yuri has tried over the years. He’d attempted everything other than active sabotage, screaming, cursing, trying to swerve him with rational, logical arguments, and every single time it ended up with Yuri enraged enough to grind sparks between his teeth, Viktor smiling that same stupid smile, nuzzling Yuri’s cheek before flying off to who the fuck knows where.

To date, Lilia is the only creature in Yuri’s memory to actually stonewall Viktor instead of the other way around— through sheer terrifying force of presence. Yakov certainly can’t do it. Viktor’s been playing him since he was a green-horned fledgling fresh sent to the Mountains. And unfortunately, Lilia is on business a continent and a half away.

So it’s on Yuri to make sure that the scatter-brained idiot doesn’t crash and burn on one of his impulsive split-second trips. Which, in this case, is not so split-second (for worse or for the better, Yuri can’t tell) but still impulsively stupid. Because of course, of all things it could be, Viktor just had to go the route of falling in infatuation with a human.

A puny, short-lived, barely magical fucking human.

“This is going to be a catastrophe,” he growls bitterly to Mila, curling his tails over his nose. They’ve already had this conversation. She’s shrunken down to human form as to demonstrate the mechanics of the transformation to Viktor, simple red hair, pale skin, a long red dress that flares at her heels. For his part, Viktor isn’t getting it. Oh, he’s fucking human alright, all the right joints, the right skin, even walking properly now on two legs, but there’s still a sheen of power to his eyes and a crackle of energy fizzling in the air around him; the actual humans would have to be blind and having misplaced millions of years’ worth of carefully honed survival instincts to miss it.

Mila shrugs, unconcerned, sitting slouched on a rock with her ankles crossed. “Eh, he’s made do with worse.” Her mouth quirks into a smile, one side up. “Worried?”

“Ha, no,” Yuri snorts.

“You totally are,” she says, a grin in her voice. Fucking Mila. Yuri swipes a tail in the direction of her head and she tips backwards onto the rocks to avoid it, laughing. She rolls her eyes at him. “He’s a big boy.” Her tone is fond. “He’ll be fine.”

They watch as Viktor pull what is supposed to be an outer coat over his head, dark, royal blue fabric with gold stitching and tassels, and button it on so that it ends up lopsided and backwards.

Yuri slants Mila a look. She sighs, deeply.

“You know, if you’re really that worried you can just go with him,” she offers, as if this is a perfectly rational method of action, nevermind that Yuri hates crowded spaces and seeing Viktor’s idea of a human courtship ritual is just—no. “You always go to the festivals anyway. And you have the best glamours in the Mountains. He can use the help.”

“The festivals are tradition,” Yuri hisses.

“Yes yes,” Mila says patiently. “Just think of this as an early start, Yurotchka. They have a special one every ten years right? Better deals the sooner you go!” Mila swings herself up to a sit, and then smiles at him with her I-am-charming-now-do-what-I-say-smile.

“No,” Yuri says, vehemently.

A muffled sound. They both swivel to see Viktor try to wrestle the coat back over his head, arms stuck at a knotted angle.

“He could really use the help,” Mila amends.

The thing is, Yuri would. He really would. Yuri is astringent and short-tempered and razor-tongued, and he can hold a grudge in a way that all foxes do, but he cares for Viktor. Viktor helped raise him. Viktor nudged Yuri out of his frozen slump when grandfather died. Viktor had always been there for him, cheering him up, teaching him, laughing in the face of Yuri’s scowl and foul moods. It’s just—“A human,” he repeats, for what feels like the hundredth time in two weeks. He puts his muzzle onto the cool stone. “A human.”

“Nothing wrong with humans,” says Mila.

Yuri’s tone is cutting. “They don’t last.”

Dragons give out their love choosily, pickily, hoarding it close and eying the recipient with a jeweller’s measure before even bothering. In that way they are the same as foxes. But when they do decide, when they do love—they do it fiercely and completely. They have long memories. They do not forget.

Yuri knows a wind spirit that had fallen in love with a human. Once. Centuries ago.

It’s a fact. Ten years or twenty or a hundred. A hundred fifty maybe, for the ones with powerful magics. Humans don’t last.

“He’s stronger than that,” Mila says, voice quiet. Contemplative. Her hands slide through Yuri’s fur. “It’ll be alright.”

Silence. The clink of jewelry on Viktor’s wrists. Stattaco from the ceiling going drip drip drip. Echoes in the cave.

“I was,” Mila starts, voice hushed and small. She pauses, as Viktor finally faningles the coat into submission, as Yuri rests his head in her lap. “There was a queen in the southern kingdoms, a long long time ago. I loved her.” She lets out a breath, hot and curling, a heat wave shimmer in the air. “He’ll learn to let it go.”

She says: “Love is nice, when you can have it.”

She says: “He’ll always have people here, even if he doesn’t.”

*

Smooth beech wood, big as a chicken’s egg, on it is carved a bird, wings spread, tiny pin feathers drawn in hyper definition.

Yuri takes the pendant from Mila’s collection of human jewelry and weaves the glamour in with the wooden carving as an anchorage point. It takes him five days to finish. In the end though, the illusion will hold under siege and fire and a few thousand tonnes of water pressure, and with it on Viktor’s human form looks just that—human. Tall and fair skinned, slivery haired, a drawl to his crisp words. A foreign human, in Katsuki Yuuri’s hometown at the edge of the mountains, but human all the same.

His own transformation is a dozen times tighter than Viktor’s. Yuuri’s been practicing since he was two feet high with only a single tail and managing it perfectly well his sleep even then. He stands in front of the tiny hot spring village, fire and fur curled away into the shell of human skin, Mila’s blessing in the form of a feather stuck in his hair and enough gold from Viktor’s stash to buy the village over three times, and Viktor himself, pendant swinging around his neck, fucking skipping ahead and looking entirely too cheerful for this expenditure.

The air is crisp. The wind a prickling breeze on bare skin. Autumn, all the leaves washed in butters and cranberry reds, and with hands in pockets Yuri follows Viktor in the first step through the arching gates, then the second step, then the third.

“Hasetsu inn,” Viktor tells him in a hum. The sound of it like he’s floating, a sunrise, a laugh caught between the syllables. His eyes crinkle at the corners. “You’re going to meet Yuuri, Yura.”

“Get a move on already,” Yuri says, kicking him in the shin.


	2. Chapter 2

Beyond the harvest months of September and October, visitors to quaint, sleepy hometown of Hasetsu are rare and far in-between. 

There are the occasional specialists, travelling through to check energy readings and study the Mountains from a good distance, and the occasional lost and straggling traveller having stumbled past the thick brush, but apart from those Hasetsu is simply too unremarkable and out of the way to bother venturing towards. The nearest big city is a good hundred and fifty kilometers away. The single road leading to town is hard packed dirt, uneven and potholed, and more than occasionally swallowed by the thick-growing foliage. This far north the winters are harsh, all five, snow-ridden, ice-sheeted months of it, and despite the gorgeous view—forest on one side, mountain on another, the third bracketed by a turquoise-delicate lake—there are few vacationers even in the temperate summer months.

September, though.

September is like a grenade tossed into the center of town, except what spews out is not explosive, deadly force but festivities and cheerful energy and an urgent need to _get things done_. Fish are hauled and smoked. The last of the hunting is completed. Roots and vegetables are canned, jarred, pickled, plucked by the basketfuls and stuffed into cellars. Hasetsu has always been a self-sustained system, unreliant of the world outside the cradle of the Mountains, and in the middle of all this the traders come.

Sometimes they are few. Sometimes they are many. They increase, as Hasetsu's reputation slowly digs fingers into the right ears. What grows in Hasetsu tends to stay in Hasetsu, and whoever wants to profit from the town’s goods need to venture in to get at it.  Five missed harvest, five years later, eight months since he’d returned to his hometown for a breather, Yuuri watches as the traders flock in in droves.

They wheel in with their power-gem carts, on the backs of clever-footed mountain goats. Some take the buses that trundle in from the big city every morning and afternoon, others made the long and arduous trek on foot. Hasetsu is too small to warrant a blimp landing port, but even without, from the air they arrive, men and women riding great feathered birds, on enchanted gliders, one candy-striped hot air balloon floating gently into central square before deflating with a hiss. They carry with them huge bundles of goods wrapped in careful silk and paper: jewelry, books, fine candies in gilt-edged boxes. Their eyes hawk the market stalls.

They are looking for things. Well, actually, they’re looking at everything. Agate and tourmaline from the mines most of all, for power amplifiers, power holders, already charged with the Mountain’s distinct ambient magic. But they also buy the herbs and smoked fish and old man Hayato’s legendary canned plums. All of it is steeped in the Mountain’s energy. All of it sells for small fortunes in the cities.

By October, the pandemonium in the streets is almost familiar. It’s like Detroit, all noise and bustle and people pushing against one another trying to reach the best deal. Crammed into the moving mass of the market, Yuuri ducks past a man roasting chestnuts with quick, controlled bursts of fire magic, sidesteps a stall advertising medical salves, and finally tumbles out the other side into the open air fish section. All around him, the air is a mass amalgamation of scents. Smoke and dirt and the something that smells distantly of strawberry jam, and overwhelming them all as he progresses forwards is fish, muddy and a little sickly on his nose.

Jiro-san, when Yuuri finally squeezes his way into the man’s fish stall, is sun-baked and cheerful and greets Yuuri with a hearty slap on the shoulder.  Yuuri smiles back, a lot smaller and shy but genuine. Then with news on what exactly Midori’s twins had done yesterday, _can you believe the children these days_ , and bellowed instructions for his mother to not steam the fish,  “these are the perfect consistency for deep-frying!” he’s sent spinning back into the throng.

It is Yuuri’s turn to be on grocery duty. This is less because their inn has any kind of consistent schedule, and more because he had been the closest in vicinity when his mom had realized the food to customer ratio just wasn’t balancing out. He’d been promptly handed a grocery list, a still-steaming bun stuffed with pork and minced vegetables, and then herded out the door.

Yuuri visits five more stalls, apologizing on automatic every time he accidentally bumps into someone, and when he finally wades out into the quieter, residential neighbourhood it's with four bulging baskets and a paper bag of hot chestnuts tucked under one arm. A flick of his wrist. Water curls out from his metal water bottle, shifting into a flat surface. He heaves the baskets onto the thin floating cushion, and rolls his sore, aching shoulders with a sigh of relief.

The air is crisp and cool; the mountains a fogged stretch of jutting forest covered rock in the distance. It had been a good decision to come back. Yuuri had stayed in Detroit just long enough to finish up his degree, conducting research and polishing up his thesis, keeping the disaster that had been his performance at the Grand Prix grimly locked away. But now that he's here the failure seems--lighter. Soothed by time and distance. It's still a failure, no doubt about it—the biggest of his career—and the first few weeks back the sheer welcoming nonchalance had made him feel equal parts angry and guilty and queasy to his stomach. But in Hasetsu, there's always work to be done. By the time Yuuri had finished settling in he'd been too busy to reflect on that truly humiliating disaster.

A puff of thick steam hits him square in the face the moment Yuuri steps through the back door and into the inn’s kitchen. Mom is at his elbow in an instant, spatula raised. There are pots boiling and pans sizzling, everything smelling thick and warm and delicious. Yuuri gently floats the ingredients onto the floor.

"Thanks sweetheart," she tells him beamingly. A sweet bun is pressed into his hand. "Now, stables! This gentlemen in the left hall has the most beautiful horses, you'll love them. They do need a bath though." and on that end note he's cheerily sent back outside again.

See? Busy.

The horses are, indeed beautiful. They're sleek-muscled and elegant tailed and evidently well cared for, deposited in the larger stalls next to two dozing, curved beaked birds bred for long-distance flight and transport. They're also a dusted with travel, ears twitching irritably. Thankfully, the stables are built strategically close to the hot springs, and Yuuri raises the water and breaks out the soap and brushes their pelts until both horses are clean and smelling faintly of lavender.

Animals are soothing. Yuuri loses himself in the repetitive motions. He'd always relaxed around them easier than actual people, had debated between Zoology and Environmental magic studies because of it. He'd spent his childhood hiding out in the stables when there had been too many people bustling around the inn, quiet and meticulous and sensitive, a direct contrast to bold-faced and blunt Mari. Animals are easier. Simpler. Yuuri feeds the horses two sugar cubes and an apple each and they allow him to pat their ears.

Within the next four hours, Yuuri checks and re-checks the temperature of the hot springs, helps his mom put out an accidental but blazing fire, and coaxes a wailing, levitating child down from where she’d been clinging to the chimney. Just because Mari’s more inclined towards people does not translate to the fact that she’ s better with them, especially concerning small, screaming children. If it had been her, the girl probably would’ve been dragged down via water rope; Yuuri knows this through unfortunate experience.

Around the dinnertime rush, he gets herded into food delivery.

Five bowls of ramen, ten apple pies, and ten pork cutlet bowls later, Yuuri enters the kitchen to see what is possibly the largest platter of meat ever served on one of the preparation tables. Roasted pork and quail and venison stacked high. No vegetables. No rice or bread. Just… meat.

“Um,” he says, as mom scrapes another panful of bacon onto the pile.

“Yeah,” says Mari, eying it as she slides empty dishes into the sink.

Mom sets her pan down with a decision thunk. Mari, quicker on the uptake and with zero punctuations of guilt, goes back to the dishes with studious intensity. Mom wipes her hands on her apron. Before Yuuri can quietly and deftly step out of the kitchen, she zeroes in on him.

“Left corridor, fifth room,” she announces, loads both platters onto Yuri’s arms, pats his shoulder, smiles, and then at a holler from the front goes back to grilling the next order.

*

Yuuri transfers the trays onto water cushions the moment he locates the nearest tap. The corridors of the inn are narrow and usually occupied at this time, and trying to maneuver through them with two hulking piles of food is an exercise in futility at worst and broken glasses at best. The room the delivery is supposed to go is one of the higher-end suites, with nice furniture and blue painted walls and a glimmering view of the lake. Yuuri wonders who exactly is renting it. It’s… a lot of meat.

He slides the screen doors open with a heel. Pokes a head in to see the rumpled bedspread, the low wooden table, and a scattering of rich, foreign styled clothing all over the floor. There’s a person in a soft sage green yukata perched at the edge of the bed, the kind that the inn provides, braiding their way through a long, long plait of silvery thick hair. For about half a second, Yuuri is about to say “Ma’am, your food is here,” all rote manners, but then the silvery head lifts, fingers pause mid-weave, and the person—who on second glance is definitely _not_ a woman, blinks up at him and smiles in sudden delight.

Probably at the food. Yuuri shifts the platters and… gestures at them, feeling a little awkward. The man is still smiling, wide and sweet. He’s definitely a foreigner—from where, Yuuri isn’t sure—his skin is very pale and Yuuri’s never seen hair that colour before, white as poplar tree bark, at least not on someone so young. His features are sharp and delicate and look exactly nothing like that Hasetsu’s natives. He’s… pretty. Striking.

Yuuri stares at the meat and tries to make the two of them connect. Well, everyone has hidden depths.

He tries, “Food delivery?” It comes out as a question, but the man doesn’t seem to notice.  Yuuri waves the platters onto the low wooden table, glancing around the room. Now that he’s inside, he can see that there’s a fair amount of jewelry strewn around as well, some of it simple, some of it not, all of it expensive looking. A wooden pendant dangles around the man’s neck on a thin leather cord.

He sneaks a glance up at the man. The same smile. The braid tossed over one shoulder. The man’s gaze, though, seems to have ignored the existence of the food altogether, stuck firmly on Yuuri. It is blue and ice chipped and unblinkingly intense.

“Right,” says Yuuri. He takes a step backwards, and tells himself that the slightly hunted feeling is just—well. Nothing. Something. It’s a foreigner: his customs are probably different. Maybe excessive eye contact is to show gratitude. Maybe Yuuri should take dish duty from Mari and regulate all the people-interaction to her for the night. “Um. Enjoy your dinne—err?”

The hug comes as entirely unexpected.

One moment, the man is sitting, Yuuri edging for the door, the next there’s silky hair against Yuuri’s cheek, cold arms looped around his waist, the smell of pine and something sharp. Yuuri yelps, sharp and strangled, heart crawling up his throat for one startled moment. First reaction is to flinch and shove the man off, which Yuuri does. Except the man doesn’t budge, doesn’t even seem to notice. Yuuri goes stock still, arms ramrod straight at his sides. It’s less an embrace and more of the man resting his chin on Yuuri’s shoulder, really, but still intimate, and thus very very uncomfortable.

The man just kind of… stays there.

_Um._

Eight slow seconds later, to Yuri’s eternal relief, a door slides open with a screech from the far wall, and from inside stalks out a short, blond boy with mussed hair and an impressive scowl, who takes one look at them and lets out a  litany of—Well. Yuuri doesn’t actually know. The syllables are harsh and the language not one he understands, but judging from the tone it isn’t anything good.

In response, the man is positively elated. He turns, removing his head from Yuuri’s shoulder, and calls,”Yura!”

Yuuri takes his chance. He edges out at a scramble, pitches something that might have been a “Have a good day!” behind him, and slams the door shut at the blond boy’s expression of incandescent rage.

Just—

_What just happened._

*

Viktor’s first instinct, after the human takes off like a startled jack rabbit, seems to be bolting after him. Yuri snags his sleeve at a lunge two steps out the door and yanks Viktor back in, body checks him into a sit, and glowers down with a combination of flat incredulity and what the _actual fuck do you think you’re doing._  

“He ran away,” Viktor says, gaze pointed blankly at the door in bewilderment. His expression, when he turns to Yuri, is absolutely miserable: mouth crumpled, eyes wide and hurt and baffled. In a small voice, he repeats: “he ran away.”

Yuri digs a plate and a pair of chopsticks out of the tray and starts heaping on meat. Thick, marbled slabs of venison and pork, cutlets of beef dropped in sizzling oil and rolled in salt and some other woodsy spice. At this point, a full stomach is the least of what he’s due. “Yes,” he says, tearing off a chuck of venison and stabbing the chopsticks in the direction of the door. “I saw.”

Viktor’s baffled expression does not in any way diminish. His hands are white and gripping the edges of the table, tight enough to creak. Which. Well, it’s Viktor’s gold they’re using anyway. Who cares if he breaks the table.  “But _why_ ,” he asks, as Yuri glowers. “He’s never done that before.”

How is that even a question.

“Vitya. You _were a stag,”_ Yuri tells him slowly, like one would do a very small child.

“I know,” says Viktor.

He cannot actually be dealing with this. Yuri is going to—actually no—he’s not going to set Mila on fire, because that would do precisely nothing. Yuri is going to bully Georgi into watercannoning Mila out of the air or dunk her into the lake himself. Then he’s going to go back to take a very long, very belated nap, and leave her to deal with teaching Viktor human manners.

Breathe in, he tells himself, clapping a lid over the slowly bubbling lake of rage. Breathe out. Eat the meat. The meat is very good; the texture rich and chewy, even if the vegetable oil lies a little queasily on Yuri's tongue.

Focus on the meat.

 _“Yura,”_ says Viktor lamentingly.

Nope.

Yuri shoves one of the trays in front of him, slaps a clean pair of chopsticks next to Viktor’s hand with a very distinct crack, and orders, in his most menacing growl, “ _Eat._ ”

Viktor seems to wilt even more into himself. Slowly, clumsily though, he takes up the chopsticks. His handling is all wrong, so Yuri reaches over with a low, disparaging sound in his throat and fixes it. There is no way he’s having this conversation without having consumed at least a boar’s worth of food. Food generally helps to lift Viktor’s mood, and it definitely helps with Yuri’s. It’s a win-win situation.

That said, Yuri figures, assessing as Viktor tentatively dips a slice of beef into sauce, it’s definitely been a while since Viktor’s looked so… downtrodden. Nervous. Distressed at someone else’s opinion. “You look pathetic,” Yuri informs him, tucking into another slice of venison.  Viktor doesn’t laugh or tease back, which is genuinely worrying, but he does kick Yuri lightly under the table. So, at the least, he’s not that far gone.

Viktor eats, sullen and sulking. Yuri chooses to ignore him for the meantime; it is a strategy refined and proven true over the centuries.

“Humans have rules,” he explains, once he’s finished. The plate he’s shoved onto one side for room, elbows propped on the dark wood table, fingers laced under his chin. “They’re complicated and stupid and generally irritating, but since you’re so determined you’ll have to learn them.” A pause. “Or work around them. Whichever gets better results. They also,” Yuri continues dryly, and they definitely should have at given Viktor the basic pamphlet of “what to and not to do around humans” before coming all the way fucking down. “Frown upon random full-body contact. Like us. That’s _common sense_.”

“He liked me doing it before though,” Viktor says, frowning.

Yuri lets out an explosive breath. “You were _a stag_.”

“So you’ve said, repeatedly.”

“Just—“ he starts. Rubs at his temple with the heel of one palm. “It doesn’t work when you’re human. And no, don’t fucking tell him you’re the stag, that’s also common sense.” What Viktor see in this Yuuri Katsuki, Yuri can’t tell. This entire situation would be easier to swallow if he could, but Viktor is evidently going to plow on with or without Yuri. “They have a literature collection here. I’ll get you some. It might help.”

“He is not pleased with me right now,” Viktor deduces.

The human’s expression when he’d been hurtling out the door comes to mind. Yuri snorts, “not at all.”

Viktor is still frowning, but overall is demeanour his calmer, composed, with a look in his eyes that says he is calculating his next steps very carefully. “How do I get him back?”

And that, finally, that’s an easy thing to answer. Anyone that walks among humans for a given period of time will know the answer. Yuri has seen kingdoms fall for it, has seen men kill for it. Its subject is different for each and every one of them, yet the core principle stays the same. Humans, they are so small. Their lives are so short that all their yearning seems to be bundled up in one explosive charge. They desire and they desire and they desire as if one specific thing will wipe away all their struggles and failures, that one specific thing will be able to do them contention. The hard part, in this case, is finding out what that one thing is.

“What does he want?” Yuri asks.

*

The question posed here is: what does Yuuri Katsuki want?

The temperature outside the inn is cold and dropping rapidly as night overthrows day, the stars above glimmering and familiar. Viktor tilts his head out the window, blinking at the reflection of lights on the inky waters of the lake. He flexes his fingers. They are still strange, smooth and soft. An unfamiliar skin. A few, bare months of practice is not enough to remedy this.

But he does not have time to wait  much longer.

Yuuri, specifically, does not have the time.

So what does Yuuri Katsuki want?

Despite Yura’s various and vocally slingshoted doubts, Viktor does, in fact, know Yuuri Katsuki. He knows Yuuri’s favourite colour is blue and his favourite dish is his mother’s pork cutlet bowl, and that his best friend is an Earth performer mage he’d gone to university with named Phichit. He knows how Yuuri smiles, the way his eyes crinkle behind the rounded squares of his glasses. He knows that when Yuuri laughs it is high and crackling and loud and free. He knows how Yuuri had spent his childhood in this little town, how he had marched out to Detroit a continent and a half away to pursue his water magics. He knows the way Yuuri dances: the lake underneath his feet a solid, all fluid spinning motion, arms out, form like a nymph’s.

The first time Viktor had seen him it had been March.  Frost dusted the tree branches, snow melted into glacial puddles. And Viktor watched this human boy step across the water and felt all the things—all the fervor, all that vivacious passion—he’d thought drained away fill back into him. Step, twirl, flip and twist. All this soaring emotion in every movement, like the boy’s body was nothing more than a conduct for the story. He’d stayed glued to his spot along the rocky coastline as if in a delirium. Stayed staring, wondering, marvelling.

The next day Viktor went back.

And the next day.

And the day after that.

Most of the time, the boy came, sometimes, he didn’t. Viktor always did, and he found himself a nice, comfortable rock perch to observe from. When the boy danced Viktor could feel the sensation curling low and deep in his belly, a physical vibration.  It wasn’t affection and it wasn’t apprehension and Viktor hadn’t been able to identify it at first, but over time he’d thought the closest definition would be awe.

He was awed. He was wowed. He was amazed.

That someone so small could inspire such emotion. That someone so short-lived could give rise to such a beautiful, glorious thing. That someone so human could move like an extension of the water, as if the boy was part of the lake itself, but not in the way Viktor knew it. Viktor knew water as harsh and beautiful and fluid and live-giving. Viktor _is_ water. He is ice and cloud and sea-wave incarnate. He was born in the high point of the north, nurtured in the frigid temperatures of the arctic. He knows water.

But the boy. The boy had given it all a whole new meaning.

The stag was a whim. A point of contact, elegant and small and non-threatening, Viktor getting close to try and pick apart just what made this human so bright. But the boy gave him apples, and he’d smiled, and over a season and a half diverged his secrets, hushed and quiet and sometimes sheepish, sweeter than tangerine slices.

“Strawberries or mulberries?” he’d asked, July.  Viktor had let him swing onto his back to pick their way through the rocky part of the valley, his hands in knotted in Viktor antlers, berry baskets bumping at Viktor’s flank. And Viktor had bore it, no complaining or even thoughts of complaining, and Yuuri hummed, a high, thin tune like that of the red-wing birds, the air warm and green around them, and Viktor had thought: _let me keep this. Let me keep this close and as long as I can. Let me keep this forever._

He’d thought: _oh_.

So Viktor knows what Yuuri Katsuki wants. Viktor knows Yuuri Katsuki, who’d whispered his dreams and hopes into Viktor’s fur with a self-deprecating laugh in May, mentioned it again in July, looked back at it with hunched shoulders and a bitten lip in August. He knows Yuuri Katsuki, with his soft hands and his steel deposition. Yuuri Katsuki, whose laugh sounds like leaves in autumn.

The window closes, quiet. The air inside is cleaner, sharper. Viktor pads quietly over to where Yura lies sleeping, face soft in his dreams, ashy blond hair spread in a halo. His arms are curled tightly around one of the fat pillows.

He’s thankful that Yuri had come with him, even grouching and snarling all the way—thankful for Yuri, in general. He is something grounding and familiar in the middle of all this. Viktor has never bothered to deal with humans before, in any fashion, and the deficiency in knowledge shows. Yuri might not understand; Viktor probably wouldn’t have either, before this, but it’s all right.

Sweeping a tangle of hair away from Yuri’s forehead, and the fox gives a mutter of disparagement at Viktor’s touch, rolling over and batting Viktor’s hand away. He’s so small like this. Viktor’s measured him against the other humans and he’s still small, never mind in fox-terms. It’s almost like he’s a kit all over again, following clumsily in Viktor’s footsteps, tripping over his own tails.

Of course, these days, the only time Yuri is clumsy is when he “accidentally,” unrepentantly sets things of fire. Oops. My foot slipped. Sorry Yakov.

Viktor ruffles Yuri’s hair, fond and light, smiling, and heads to the soft sheets of his own bed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there's anything you liked or disliked, please drop me a note in the comments section below. ;)
> 
> Next chapter: Viktor has a Plan, Yuuri's low-key avoidance of a certain customer does not work, and there is more worldbuilding.


	3. Chapter 3

The backroom of Yuuko’s shop is a haphazard pile of boxes and cabinets and miscellaneous potion ingredients. Shelves teeter over with bits and pieces of unfinished bracelet and string. There are books scattered across the room’s huge and single table, ten different brands of talisman paper wedged in a lone corner between two wooden crates. Across the higher shelves glass jars march in neat rows: _ground moth’s wings, preserved rose metals, garnets_ , _willow bark_. The single window in the room drapes golden sunlight across the few bare inches of wooden flooring, honey glazed and sweet, its white-painted sill crammed with lushly flowering plants.

Hunched over a sheaf of gilt-edged, neatly cut paper strips, Yuuri dips his brush into the inkwell and carefully traces out characters for a preservative talisman. Runework is one of the only areas of castor magic Yuuri can do with any measure of proficiency. His spell-casting capabilities seemed to have plateaued near middle school level, both from lack of practice and lack of interest. But Yuuri’s handwriting has always been precisely neat if not exactly grandiose, and in the rush season of traders and tourists, “precisely neat” is good enough, especially at the rate all of Yuuko’s wares are clearing out.

Yuuri is… not exactly hiding.

The point is: in the trading season, Yuuko’s _Miscellaneous Potions and Charms_ is always in need of volunteers, either to run errands or to churn out goods to meet the increased demand, or, in recent years, to babysit. Yuuri isn’t hiding because this is a job he probably would have taken anyway. He doesn’t have the experience or control needed to infuse magic into delicate objects like Yuuko does, but he helps gather the materials and mashes the appropriate ingredients and keeps an eye out on the triplets, and in return, Yuuko gives the inn free batches of her wares.

It’s a good system. It works. It’s been working since Yuuko’s grandmother first started _Miscellaneous Potions and Charms_ and Yuuri’s grandmother decided the hotsprings would make a perfectly good tourist attraction. It’s just that Yuuri has probably been spending more time holed up in Yuuko’s back store room than can be deemed healthy.

He’s switched shifts with Mari too. Meaning, Mari gets all the customer service while Yuuri lurks at the fringes of the inn, tending to the split-second shopping trips, the stables, the late night dishwashing duty and cleaning. The change isn’t even that big; these are the chores Yuuri would choose to do normally, just augmented a little. Mari hasn’t asked why; she’d raised a questioning eyebrow and shrugged, loose and easy, before giving Yuuri the grooming brush when he’d chased her down anxiously into the stables.

This way leads to minimal human interaction, meaning minimal interaction with the silver-haired, slightly creepy, overly exuberant, was-that-a-cultural-misunderstanding-they’d-had-back-there stranger. In any case, the man seems to be everywhere in the inn: a flash of long hair around a corner, the disturbing amount of meat piled high in the kitchen. Outside of it as well in the marketplace, chatting amiably with the stall owners. Mari had informed him over dinner that he had been asking for Yuuri. Which, of course, just made Yuuri’s efforts of avoidance continue with renewed vigour.

He knows that he should probably confront the stranger. It’s the logical course of action, rather than all this skirting around the issue. But the thought of it makes something in Yuuri seize, something anxious and leaden and tight in his belly. The man’s not staying long anyway. People rarely do. Outsiders come to Hasetsu because of the mountains, but they also don’t _stay_ because of the Mountains. Specialists migrate their way north to study them. Children have been dared to go into the dense, looming woodland surrounding their base. The Mountains are huge and sprawling and unexplored. They _cannot_ be explored. People have tried, and they’ve wandered back out missing memories, missing limbs, missing their minds.

Most of them don’t come back out at all.

Taken from Yuuri’s Environmental Magic Studies textbook, the official textbook term for it is _wild: a swathe of land grown over a ley-line, rich with ambient magic and hazardous creatures._ Wild like the dark corners of the oceans; wild like the forests in the Southern continents, where time is of abstract concept and the trees will take a person into their branches and swallow them whole; wild like the far, jagged cliffs of the air monks.  They are not the only inhabitants of this planet, and there are creatures out there the size of apartments with fire and claws, capricious personalities, and a lengthy memory for grudges.

So people come, but they don’t stay, because Hasetsu is terribly, treacherously close to the Mountains. Areas like this, the land itself is a sentient thing. Rocks have ears and trees have teeth; they are not known to take kindly to outsiders.

The longest Yuuri estimates the stranger will be present is the last week of October. Maybe early November, if he’s particularly stubborn. Any later than that and all the roads will be thick with snow and ice, the air ominous with blizzard weather.

Everyone leaves before winter sets in.

Yuuri can wait it out if he has to. That’s the plan.

*

He spends dinner at Yuuko’s. The Nishigori family live in a flat right above the shop, and Yuuko shoos him out of his working trance and up the stairs with the triplets sometime after dusk. “Have something to eat, Yuuri-kun!” she hollers after him. When Yuuri glances down the railing, he can see the dark blue of her apron and the messy top of her bun, and then with the stir of air and the pitter-patter of feet on wood, Axel and Lutz and Loop are all clambering at his heels.

“Can we have salmon?” says Axel.

“Um,” says Yuuri.

“I want rice balls,” says Loop. Her scrunchies are purple, and today her hair sits in low pigtails.

“Salmon rice balls,” says Lutz having come to a compromise. She looks at Yuuri imploringly.

Three sets of eyes focus. Yuuri has no idea what Yuuko has in her fridge, but salmon and rice and seaweed is usually a given staple. He can feel whatever dinner plans he’s slowly formulating give way to having salmon as the main course. He bites his lip. Axel tugs edge of his sweater, and Yuuri smiles down at her. “Sure,” he says.

“And mushroom soup,” Lutz declares in her imperious princess voice as they march up the stairs. “Or onion soup. Soup is nice.”

“Do you want the inn special?”

All three of them agree simultaneously. “Yeah!”

Yuuri is not being bulldozed by six year olds. Bulldozed was when he had first arrived back town, and the following two weeks an endeavour of three hyper-intense, duckling children scampering after him with notebooks and pens and an overwhelming number of questions. He’d tripped a total of ten times when one of the triplets had popped out of seemingly nowhere. Yuuko had been sincerely apologetic.  Yuuri had tried to answer their questions to the best of his ability, and also not to choke anytime his tea went down the wrong tract.

All the lights are off. The door is unlocked, the loft is dark but cozy. Axel floats up with help from her sisters to hit the switch. Overhead, reams of rose quartz flush the living room in a soft, pale glow.

Yuuri removes his shoes. It still feels like an intrusion these days, entering someone else’s space so casually, even though he’s been over to Yuuko and Takesh’s more times than he can count this past year. He moves carefully. He categorizes the ingredients: mushrooms, potatoes, carrots and canned peaches, basil and oregano sitting near the window sills. There is indeed salmon. Yuuri takes one out of the icebox and makes a note to tell Yuuko her _cold_ talisman is looking worn.

Takeshi walks in just as Yuuri is adding last minute spices to the soup, the salmon neatly filleted but the rice still trundling in the cooker. The triplets have been amusing themselves by flicking bits of floatsom light towards one another. Each little ball is no bigger than a spark—the limit of what their magic reserves can afford for now. It drifts in the air before fizzling away. Light, shield, flare, these three are the basics of spell-castor magic that all Hasetsu children are taught, part engrained tradition, part peace of mind.

“Looks good,” Takeshi tells him, shucking off his boots and heavy jacket. The triplets wave in unison, chortling a mixture of “welcome home!” and “Daddy we have soup!” and “Look at this!” Axel takes a breath and blows out, and the firefly light in her hand shoots towards Takeshi to land on his shirt. All three of the triplets inherited Yuuko’s air-affinity. Considering Takeshi isn’t affiliated with any element, it makes sense Yuuko’s genes would be dominant.

Takeshi waves Yuuri off to the dining table. “Come’on,” he says, taking over the gem-stove and the ladle. “You’re the guest Katsuki.” Yuuri scoots into his seat—has he actually been coming over that often?—and the triplets combine their efforts so that a light ball the size of a peach pops over Yuuri’s glasses.

Right. They should be in first grade now. The new term started in September, and the light ball is, if Yuuri is remembering this correctly, the first spell taught.

Stripped to its bare-bones, magic consists of three core components: _power, focus, and effect_. Every living thing has some measure of power in them, although how much of it depends on species and upbringing and heritage.

Focus is in the direction. It is in runework, in words of power, in technique and spells and potions and charms. It is the ability to channel that energy into something of use. In humans, it depends mostly on genetics. There have been studies upon studies upon studies done. Sometimes environment can help alter the focus, and sometimes contracts made with a creature of morally and ethically questionable means do too, but mainly it’s in the genes.

Not that it means that a person can _only_ practice their affinity. Some people don’t have affinities at all. It’s just… easier, for those that do. There’s some sort of innate understanding of the concepts singing in their bones. Yuuri could have chosen illusion or dreamwalking in his high school courses, but he hadn’t. He’d taken Advanced Elemental practical for his requisite magic course and then took Advanced functions math instead.

Frankly, magic is a lot like math.

Magic is like math in that the further along the track one goes, the more complicated all the details become, with branches upon branches of study based on a single fraction of a field. Also like math, it’s part of the standard education curriculum. Some people hate it, some people love it. Some people decide to pursue a career in it: university professor, field analyst, inventor. Practically anyone can become a mage. But in the same way that anyone can become a doctor, or an engineer or an accountant; the road there is a culmination of sweat and arduous practice and coffee-fueled all-nighters, and a certain passion for the subject is necessary in order to trudge out the other side with certificate in hand.

Takeshi ladles out the soup, and then the rice is ready, and they bring the salmon to the dining table to make rice balls with sticky fingers. Yuuko comes up halfway through, having closed up the shop. She kisses the tops of the triplets’ heads and Takeshi’s cheek and bumps her shoulder affectionately against Yuuri’s. Loop and Axel and Lutz talk in turns: bits of gossip they overheard in the marketplace, how their school day went, the fact that they got a sugar-twist off of a foreigner by bringing out their feed-me-please-I’m-adorable eyes. Yuuko flicks them on their foreheads, sighing, and they grumble into their soup.

It’s a comfortable rhythm. Classic Hasetsu, in fact.

“Hey,” Takeshi says, chasing a spoonful of mushrooms around in his bowl. He’s looking sideways at Yuuri, passing the soy sauce to Lutz all the while. “Katsuki.” Yuuri blinks up at his name. “If you need the help. Just know we’re here okay?”

Yuuri doesn’t what brought this on. He swallows his mouthful of soup. Yuuko is scrubbing furiously at Axel’s mouth with a napkin, and Takeshi is still looking at him sideways, contemplative. “I know,” says Yuuri, not sure how to reply.

“He means you always try to take on too much, Yuuri-kun,” says Yuuko. “It’s alright to trouble and rely on people once in a while. We’re happy to.”

He thinks about Hasetsu. Its sleepy shores, its sleepy people, content in their ordinary lives and ordinary happiness. He thinks about stepping back: coming home, this tight, tight community, welcoming him back into its cradle with bright smiles and not a missing beat. Something in his chest goes tight, fierce and joyful. “I know,” says Yuuri, and hides his smile behind his soup bowl.

*

Pre-dawn is the best time for practice.

It is all quiet out, nothing but the long stretching shadows of the forest, the moon a perfect half in the sky, glazed white as cake frosting.  Leaves crinkle underneath Yuuri’s light tread; the sound of pressure on fallen branches, not quite a snap, not quite a creak. Beyond the horizon line the mountains rise, their sloping tips painted over with a film of translucent cloud, and in-between the sky is a strip of teal edging out to navy, to black, stars white and glimmering and distant overhead.

Yuuri leaves his scarf and jacket hanging from one of the elm trees along the coast. He tugs on the openings of his gloves. They’re black, buttery smooth leather, and he’s wearing a thin shirt and worn pants and his favourite pair of practice shoes. The air is stingily chilly. Yuuri breathes in, breathes out, sees a plume of white condensation curl away in the weak pale light.

He looks down at the surface of the lake. It is all liquid mercury, smooth and perfect and undisturbed, black apart from the reflection of the moon and the barely-there illumination provided by the backdrop of Hasetsu’s residents. His family’s inn rises a quiet while away, two square window shining gold under the glass.

In his head, he counts _one two three—_

Yuuri takes two steps back, rocks forwards on his heel, and then leaps.

The drop isn’t huge, barely two meters, and the lake holds his weight without so much as a ripple. Everything is _practice practice practice_. Yuuri sprints and feels the wind on his face, makes it ten steps before he reduces the friction and then he’s gliding, arms spread, doing quick, warmup spins and leaps as if he were on ice instead of liquid. The lake knows him; Yuuri knows the lake. He is water-born, just as his sister is, just as his parents are, water seeped into their bloodline and their magics, liquid particles humming a language of vibration and song at their fingertips.

There is Yuuri’s father: freezing lemonade into popsicles in summer, cutting igloos of huge snowdrifts in winter, gathering the condensation in the air to tell tales through water vapour. There is Yuuri’s mother: never allowing the soups in their house to go cold. Pouring sake, a grand show, as thin streams loop out of the bottle and twirl before landing in their cups. The act of laundry duty as she reads a book: add soap, wave in the water, send it spinning in their backyard before draining out the excess moisture and letting it sun. There is Mari: her water ropes, her delicate, delicate ice sculptures. He remembers a fawn, the glitter of its eyes, the smooth slope of its back, tall as Yuuri was at eight, head high and translucent and proud.

And there is Yuuri.

Yuuri in summer, diving into the shallows and letting the current carry him wherever it pleases. Yuuri in winter, walking on top of the first snowfall without a footprint left to show. In spring, he freezes flowers, creeping frost up the stems and heart-shaped petals, kept in bouquets on the windowsills that will not wilt. There is fall, and Yuuri raises the salmon in a silver tidal wave, sleeves bunched at his elbows, shorts soaked, the old man Jiro laughing as he launches the nets.

The water sustains him. The water has always sustained him, and out of everyone in his family it is Yuuri that embraced the water back, held onto it tight with both hands and breathed it in until it was every pore of him, every dream and motion. When he was twelve Yuuri read of adhesion and cohesion in his science textbook. _The ability of water to stick to itself. The ability of water to stick to other objects._ That same afternoon, he thought of molecules under his fingers, the chaotic ping-pong of liquid particles in space, and when he placed one foot onto the surface of the lake and told it _stay still_ it did.

There is a stunning sort of joy in this; nothing but Yuri and the lake and the mountains, the world still dark with sleep. He closes his eyes, tips back his head, bends to a spin and comes up kicking his leg over his head, hands on the surface of the lake, flips into a cartwheel and then a layout.

In his teenage years, Yuuri had spent more time gliding through the lake—both on its surface and below—than he did in his own house. Coming back had been like breath of familiarity. He knows its secrets better than anyone other than the nature spirits: the women in the trees, the nympths with their bright jewel eyes, seaweed and agate tangled in their hair. They don’t come near the town, not usually and certainly not often, but Yuuri sees them when he goes deeper and closer to the mountains. Out in his peripheral: the ripple of a water dress, the eyes of someone ageless in a young girl’s face. They disappear when he tries to get a better glimpse, and Yuuri doesn’t search for them afterwards. That would be rude, dangerous,  potentially offensive. Spirits who want to be known will make themselves so. Sometimes he leaves strands of agate and pearl on the rocks as an offering and gets shells in return.

Soft light flickers behind his eyelids, yellow and hazy. Yuuri twirls, blinking. All around him, the lilies are unfolded, waxy petals lit aglow, threads of shining light drifting through the cove, sparks catching and fizzling as they dip too close to the water. His feet know the way here on automatic habit. Yuuri breathes deep, gets into position, and starts.

The routine is one of his early ones. Simple. Easy. Made back when he had just started out in Detroit, keeping his head down more than usual, still lurking at the edges of the practice areas and actively trying to dodge Pchit’s camera-happy finger. But it’s nice. All flowing movements, minimalist flourishes, elegant and soft.

Yuuri loses himself to it.

He finishes with his arms spread in front of him, head dipped down towards the water. He’s breathing hard. That’s—well. He’s been at it for a while. The sky is lightening. Yuuri squints at the horizon line and pushes a fringe of sweaty hair out of his eyes.  

The applause comes as a complete surprise.

For a second the sound doesn’t register. It’s _loud_. It echoes a little. Yuuri hears it over his own huffed breaths and the still-exultant pound of his blood in his ears. Then it does, like a snap from a trance. Yuuri’s heart makes a leap for his throat and his concentration breaks, frazzles, and he barely gets it under control to avoid dunking the entirety of himself into the lake. His shoes and the cuffs of his pants take the brunt of the damage, now dripping wet.

“Excellent.”

Yuuri can feel the flush rising to his cheeks, utter mortification mixed with indignation mixed with alarm and he draws smaller into himself. It’s not a familiar voice. Still, there’s something about it that scrapes at the far edges of Yuuri’s memory, the cadence and accent rounding out the edges. He turns just in time to see a shadow drop from the cove ledge, colours and features sharpening as it nears the light. His first thought automatically jumps to the spirits. But—no. Yuuri makes out long silvery hair. Trailing blue fabric. Glints of gold off of silver embroidery. It’s the stranger, the same man Yuuri has been low-key trying to avoid for the past two weeks, smiling sweet and wide, backlit by the cliffs and the shimmering lights.

“You are very good,” the man informs him, making his way around the water lilies.

For a moment, Yuuri stares at his own shoes, mortification overriding everything else and making his ears burn. There’s something distinctively private about Yuuri’s practices, some part of himself split open and bared, and having another person there is just…

Embarrassing. Humiliating. He wants to put his head in his hands and _sink_.

A pause. Then, in an almost hesitant tone, the man says: “Katsuki Yuuri?”

Yuuri’s head snaps up. “Um.” He says. “Yes.” There’s a good distance between them. Maybe he can… flee. That worked well last time.

How did the man even get here?

The man’s expression swings toward cheerful again, and Yuuri does not really want to contemplate the genuinely alarming idea of being followed, somehow, all the way to the border of the mountains.

“Viktor Nikiforov,” the man introduces, holding out a hand.

Yuuri looks at the hand.

He doesn’t take it. He stays at his spot, gaze flickering, shoulders hunched, wary and not exactly sure what to do. “Ok…ay.” He straightens a bit. Yuuri is pretty sure he can outrun him, but the water is like smooth glass underneath Viktor’s feet, and Yuuri knows from experience that that takes very, very fine control. “Viktor. Right. Er. Did you follow me?”

“Yes,” says Viktor. He seems to be almost cheerful about it.

Yuuri slides back a good meter on principle from unknown stalking strangers. “… Why?” he asks weakly.

Viktor blinks like this is a question that Yuuri should already know the answer to, which, considering this is Yuuri’s practice that’s been intruded upon, seems patently unfair. “I asked for you at the inn,” he tells Yuuri, matter of fact with an odd bird-like tilt of his head. “You were busy, or you weren’t there at all. I wanted to talk to you.”

Which is the basic opposite of what Yuuri wants, apparently, hence the past two weeks of ducking into corridors and grocery duty and stringing talismans at the back of Yuuko’s shop. He eyes Viktor with great trepidation, and, hoping he won’t come to regret it, asks: “about?” His voice is surprisingly level.

Maybe he should be running around now.

“Your performance arts,” says Viktor. There’s a straightening set to his shoulders. His eyes glow lightning blue in dark, and he looks equal parts ethereally beautiful and ethereally disquieting, as if he were part fae. “Yuuri Katsuki. Grand Prix qualifier. World-ranked elemental performer registered by the Association. You’re known for your artistry and your beautiful transitions.” He takes a step forward, and the lake shifts around him. Yuuri slides back another few feet before he—stops. Holds his breath. Water curls up around Viktor and glitters into ice, an entire forest sets out in miniature, trees and birds and houses with tiny, tiny details etched on.

Yuuri stares.

The control needed for that would have to be— _Fantastical._ Yuuri knows control. He has studied it and studied under it and tried to replicate it through arduous practice. All of this in a bare second?

That’s unheard off.  

Viktor gestures around him. The forest disappears with a hiss of steam. He smiles, a little lopsided, and it makes his features soft, human, makes it bear an almost childish friendliness. “You’re good, but I’m better. I would like to coach you, Katsuki Yuuri.”

*

The stag isn’t by the valley.

It’s noon, and the stag isn’t by the valley. It hasn’t been for the past month and a half and Yuuri wonders glumly why he expected it to show up now, apart from the fact that it would’ve taken his mind considerably off of the morning’s events. He sits with his back to a tall granite stab, plucks an apple out from his basket and bites into the cool, crisp flesh. There’ too much fruit inside for Yuuri to eat by himself. It’s stuffed with peaches, plums, mountain apples, and also two jars of raspberry jam because Yuuri’s discovered that the stag has an unexpected sweet tooth.

 _“Think it over,”_ echoes Nikiforov’s voice in his head, and Yuuri frowns into the distance.

The first problem to this entire debacle is that Yuuri doesn’t know _who_ Viktor Nikiforov is. He’s skilled; that’s one thing for certain, but apart from that Yuuri’s knowledge of Viktor is pinky short. He doesn’t know if Viktor is credible. He’s never heard of Viktor’s name. Viktor Nikiforov is silver-haired, foreign and rich, consumes an appalling amount of meat, and wants to be Yuuri’s coach.

That’s not a lot of material to go over.

He’d also offered Yuuri his arm when they’d gone back to Hasetsu, elbow out, gentlemanly, which Yuuri had politely declined. He’d walked Yuuri back to the lakeshore. Then he’d left, presumably to head back to the inn, while Yuuri collected his jacket and scarf.

Yuuri turns these facts over in his head and gets back a description with too many pieces missing and a pounding migraine. At this point, genuinely interested coach is his Yuuri at his most optimistic, and creepy-stalker is… well, it is what it is.

He lets his head fall backwards onto the rock with a thump.

He wants to see the stag. It is Yuuri’s not quite secret, all huge pale eyes and a cheerful friendliness. He wonders what drove it away. Maybe the oncoming winter. Maybe the noise and bustle of fall had made it venture further into the woods. Maybe Yuuri himself, with an action he did not know the consequences of.

Yuuri sits and polishes off his apple, a peach, the ham sandwich he'd prepared for lunch. He waits another half an hour slowly eating the slippery soft sugar plums wedged at the bottom of the basket.

Then, with still no sign of the stag, Yuuri heaves himself up and begins the trek towards town.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Winter break is here, so, hopefully, the next few chapters will be written a little more quickly. In any case, you guys are amazing. The response to this story is just--wow. WOW. Your reviews and goodwill fuel my muse. XD
> 
> Next chapter: Yuuri comes to a decision. Viktor consults harlequin romance novels, and the triplets meet Yuri Plisetsky.
> 
> If there's anything you liked, please leave me a comment below!


	4. Chapter 4

Yuri wakes up at noon.

Blinking up, the room is dark. The ceiling is grey with shadows. A thin slit of light cuts across the floor from an angle in the curtains and slices through the patterns on Yuri’s duvet. He unsticks his cheek from where it’s plastered to the pillow, shoves a fringe of pale hair out of his eyes. On the opposite wall a human time piece sits above a dark-wood cabinet, its hands going tick tick tick.

He stretches up, feeling his joints and spine crack with the movement. That was a nice nap. Not quite as good as basking on one of the heat-warmed river rocks in the forest, of course, but Yuri’s muscles are loose and languid and his thoughts pleasantly centered, and for once it seems that Viktor isn’t just beyond the rice-paper division, ready to be loud and sparklingly obnoxious.

Knuckling the sleep from his eyes, Yuri slides out of bed and drifts the few steps to the door, shoving it open with a rattle. What to have for breakfast today, he wonders idly. Maybe tea on rice, maybe the salmon special. Maybe he won’t eat in the inn at all. The market stalls are bound to be open by now, and Yuri’s in a good enough mood to elbow his way through the masses if it means something tasty.

Mentally, he organizes his list.

Squid on a stick. Glasses of those bubbling fountain drinks and sweat-smelling herbal teas. A prosciutto sandwich first, with the crispy-soft bread and the layer of tomato and olive paste, than a trip to the bakery for specially cookies still hot from the ovens. He takes a step forward, thinks of carefully frosted cupcakes with chocolate mousse and mango slices. Something gives underneath his toes and Yuri nearly slips on a laminated cover.

 _Goddamnit_ Viktor.

His hand snatches the edge of the door frame just as he starts backwards. Yuri rights himself, irritation mounting, and glares down at what looks like a human picture book.

Mainly because it _is_ a human picture book.

The cover amounts to a giraffe with a cone-shaped hat and colour streamers all around it, and a title drawn in blocky yellow letters. Yuri makes a singularly disgusted noise. Fucking Vitya couldn’t remember to keep his mess away from Yuri’s room for a single forsaken day, even when Yuri had reminded him, repeatedly—as in every day for the past week—with threats of extreme bodily harm.

Where the hell _is_ Viktor, anyway.

Pinpointing him is easy enough. It’s simple; it’s automatic, like trying to locate a glacier the size of a mountain in the middle of desert when you’re standing a bare meter away. Viktor’s presence shines like a star, feeling of arctic currents and bedrock and fresh rain, drowning out the firefly signatures of Hasetsu’s inhabitants in a high and looming tide, and it would be overwhelming if Yuri hadn’t been so used to it.

He’s nearby. Somewhere further north, just at the edge of town. The burn of Viktor’s magic is a flash of white light at the back of Yuri’s eyelids. Of course the idiot isn’t even trying to cloak his magic. How exactly the humans can’t sense it, Yuri doesn’t know—The charm is good but it’s not that good, especially when Viktor is pouring off residual energy like a leaking, overjoyed faucet.

Scrubbing a hand through his hair, Yuri breathes in deep through the grind of his molars. He flares his own magic, fire and magma and unruly temper, showy and angry, and for a second the white spot in the distance that is Viktor wavers, decidedly sheepish. Yuri makes a note to start setting fire to Viktor’s books in front of him. That, at least, should get the lesson through his stupid, volcano-thick brain.

For now though, everything is still a mess. The floor is a disaster. Viktor’s room, in itself, is a disaster.

Everything is scattered. Vexingly bright pamphlets from the market, library books in various states of disarray, little paperbacks with freshly cracked spines and sticky notes lining the edges, all of it sprawled in a flurry across the hardwood floor and unmade bed.

Yuri kicks a hardcover away; it smacks the bedpost and flutters down to land with a pathetic thump.

He looks at Viktor’s overloaded cabinet, at the desk at the corner, both of them with paper stacks that are taller and teetering more precariously than they had the day before. The place is beginning to carry the smell of ink and worn leather even with an open window bringing in fresh forest air. The bedside table is the only remotely organized spot in the room, and the bedside table is not a spot Yuri wants to contemplate, mainly because it gives him a headache. Viktor uses it to host his… “human courting rituals” materials.” As in the terribly written, terribly…everything romance novels that Viktor had found in the convenience store just around the corner, of which are now being underlined, indexed, and referred to with great fervor and a cheerful dismissal to all of Yuri’s Fuck no do you want him to hate you?

The newest one has a human male and female on the front cover. Both are in various stages of undress. They’re backlit by a picture of a sunset, and crashing waves.

There are times Yuri feels honestly fucking sorry for Yuuri Katsuki.

Another book hits the bed as Yuri kicks it hard. It has a library sticker on the bottom, the same as approximately ninety percent of the objects in the room. “Ugh,” he mutters, turning heel and stalking his way outside. _“Ugh.”_

Seriously. Why.

*

  
Breakfast goes better.

Contrary to Viktor’s poetic waxings about everything Yuuri Katsuki, food is the true achievement humanity has managed through their long and pathetic evolution. Yuri’s usual spot at the bakery corner is occupied though, even when twelve thirty in the afternoon means that the number of customers is decidedly lacking. He bares his teeth at the middle-aged man sitting at his table. The middle-aged man does not look up from his newspaper. Yuri scowls his way up to the counter and orders a dozen and half cookies the size of dinner plates.

He plows through ten of them along with a smoothie the size of a vase. There’s cranberry shortbread, double chocolate with peanut butter, almond and pistachio cookies sprinkled in sea salt. Three white chocolates wedged with toffee filling, and then this marshmallow one that sticks between his canines, sweet and white.

By the time Yuri’s done with his smoothie, he’s almost in a good mood again.

The rest of the cookies, he bags. Then he’s outside, shoulder shoving open the door of the bakery, glass sliding underneath his fingertips. It’s loud, without the division. The inside of the bakery had smelt of warm sugar and milk and sweet, melting things, felt of crystal static, small magics humming behind the glass displays and the kitchen around the corner. Hasetsu is a simple town, but it’s still a town. Outside is scents and sounds and signatures all mangled together, traders winging their carts down the streets, nothing systematic to the process at all, and without the soothing, steady foundation of nature magic to ground it, some days the place grates on Yuri like metal on a bare nerve.

Thankfully, today has not degraded quite that far into one of those days.

He goes to the shopping district. It’s not the open-air chaos of the market-place, but the doors of the shops are propped cheerfully open and people mill on the cobbled stone path. There’s a solid lineup of artistry stores near the back—paints and glassware and ceramics and pottery—and a few boutiques and a flower shop with asters set out in front. Yuri bypasses the furniture shop for the little antique store wedged in the corner, the one he’d been planning to check out for the past two days ago. An old woman sits at the counter, a cup of tea at hand, and from one of the taller shelves a glass bird ruffles its wings and trills at an impressive register in Yuri’s direction.

Inside hosts a lot of clocks. Watches. Yuri’s fingers itches for the watches—he’s taken apart a lot of them over the past week. Human mechanisms are one of the grudgingly fascinating things about their species, even if most of the time it’s used for inane and stupid sounding tasks. They’re delicate. The pieces slide together and click. They’re pretty too, when it counts, the craftsmanship fine, and even though foxes aren’t hoarders by nature, Yuri’s spent most of his life in the company of three dragons and an over-sized fire chicken that stockpiles glass.

He knows his aesthetics.

He’s also bought enough random crap to fill a specially commissioned storage room at the inn, and at this point it’s basically a hobby. He doesn’t have any specific niche he likes to fill, not like the others, but—nice things. Complicated things. Things wrapped in metal and silver, things that glow. Beautiful things. He has troves hidden all over the forest, hiding places in the caves and cliffside. It’s rubbed off on him.

At least his stuff is actually organized and not disturbing anyone, unlike look how-many-books-I-can-stuff-in one-place-fucking-Viktor. Ugh. Ugh. Even this fucking shop has a better organization system than Viktor. The grating thing is that Viktor isn’t usually disorganized. His hoard is meticulous. It’s just now, and it’s ridiculous.

Yuri leaves the shop minus a stack of bills and with three shopping bags banging against his shins. He buys the obnoxious glass bird too. It has surprisingly good pronunciation, even if all it knows is insults of various and shitty qualities. Yuri had been thinking of melting it into a pile of goo before deciding that it’ll make the perfect gift for Mila.

It’ll make a very, very perfect gift.

His footsteps crunch on the white-grey stone. Bits of grass and flower poke out from the cracks, most of them wilting now with winter on the horizon. Next stop: the magic-shop. He stops just outside of the squat, two-story building, with its stone foundations and dark wood, wide windows displaying rows of careful origami creatures. Even from outside the pungent musk of dried herbs is distinct. The gilt lettering on the door reads: _open_. On the window in looping red is the shop’s name.

_Miscellaneous Charms and Potions._

Yuri kicks open the door and walks in.

*

The first thing is the voices. There are three of them, or maybe just one of them, but either way it—they—it is pitched to a frankly alarming decibel level. It’s sharp. High. Squeaking on the last syllable. And certainly loud enough to override the jingle of the bell as Yuri strides in. “WELCOME!” It choruses, as the door sways shut behind Yuri, and he twitches, automatically feeling his lips fold back into a snarl. He takes one menacing step forward on habit, shoulders drawn, fists clenched, just in time for three tiny humans to jump up from behind a rack full of paper slips.

“Welcome welcome welcome!” They sing.

Yuri stops.

He squints at them.

Yuri’s never been good at identifying one human from another. They all look the same, although then again, it’s not as if he’s ever tried very hard in that department. Recognition via scent and magic signatures has served him well enough in lieu of trying to puzzle out faces, but these three are—the same. They’re the same no matter how much he looks at it. They have the same short hair and the same maroon jacket and the same wind-earth scent, something like wheat and tree bark. He squints harder. The one furthest on the left advances two steps, peers at his hair, his bags, and exclaims: “It’s a for-ei-gner!”

“All of ‘em are,” says middle.

“Those are from old Lady Kaya’s,” says right, also shuffling close now to poke at Yuri’s bags. She tiptoes up and looks in. “Hey you bought the viola! Mama says it’s been around for longer than her. Doesn’t play right though,” she trails a little finger down the wood of the curve, and the entire instrument shivers, the bow shaking itself off and scattering a dusting of resin over Yuri’s toes.

The little girl laughs, delightedly. She pats the scroll like one would a favoured pet and the bow bounces up to touch her hand.

Yuri doesn’t do anything. He’s not exactly sure what to do in this situation—if they were adults sure, but humans are fragile and human children are… human children. So instead he stays very still, which turns out to be a mistake, because apparently the other two take this as a damned invitation to bounce closer.

Yuri does not, in any way, want them closer. Hatchlings or guppies or calves or kits or tiny humans, the universal constant that Yuri has experienced is that children are grudgingly cute only at a distance, because any closer is when they start grabbing his ears and getting berry juice all over his fur and asking questions. And no matter how many times he threatens to set them on fire, the only thing they do is cling harder. In that, they and Viktor share numerous personality traits.

Frowning down crossly, he shifts his hand to yank his bag away. One of the three reaches out to snatch at his sleeve. She looks at it very intensely. Why, Yuri doesn’t know, it’s the standard clothing the inn hands out, a pale blue yukata with a black sash and sandals. He’d fallen asleep in the transformation last night and hadn’t bothered to change this morning.

The girl rubs the fabric between her fingers, her brows fold, mouth pursing. “Hey, aren’t ya cold in this?”

“… No,” Yuri answers warily.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Mama says we’ll catch a cold if we go out in a-ny-thing-less.”

“That’s from Yuuri’s place,” says another, bumping hips with her sister.

The third eyes him reprovingly. “You’re only supposed to wear this inside you know.”

“Unless it’s summer,” says number two.

“It’s not summer.”

“Oh my god,” Yuri mutters. It’s starting. All this over a stupid scrap of cloth he doesn’t need in the first place. He rolls his shoulders, and the transformation shimmers, blue fading into red, soft to rigid. In his mind’s eye, the pale gold of his fur morphs, shifts, changes, and when it’s done Yuri stands in a red jacket and dark-washed jeans, boots that lace up at his ankles. “There. Happy?” he demands.

All three of them are looking up at him with wide, shining eyes.

“That was—“

“So cool—“

“How’d you do that!”

If it’s possible, they’re even closer now, literally pressed up against his bags, faces expectant and imploring and looking at Yuri like he some exiting fascination. Each of them has somehow managed to get a pen and notepad in hand, which—what the actual fuck.

Number two takes a deep breath in.

That’s it. Yuri is done. That is his signal to get out, before the inevitable litany of questions Yuri just knows is fucking coming—children are terrible, end of story— but before she can get a word out edgewise, a holler shoots out from the bowels of the shop. A woman’s voice, young and high, curves through the mess of shelves. “Axel, Lutz, Loop! Are you bothering the customers again?”

The brats that are Axel, Lutz, and Loop look at one another. Then, because they’re little shits, simultaneously decide: “No, mama!”

“Yes,” says Yuri, with emphasis.

“Girls!” comes the voice again, sternly reminding.

The little shits cringe. Their expressions turn some mix between betrayed and mulish, and then one of them—number two—takes the split-second lead to shout back, “We’re introducing him around.” For a moment she looks very pleased with herself for having thought of this, until she blinks up and meets Yuri’s very flat gaze.

“No, you’re not,” he says.

They choose to ignore him, the fuckers. This is becoming an unfortunate trend. Even as the first plants her hands on her hips the other two brats latch onto Yuri’s legs and push, using their combined momentum to propel him inside.

Yuri hates kids.

“No,” he repeats, harsher now, still not quite a snarl because he’s old enough to have some restraint. And these are just children. Just kits. Which simultaneously makes Yuri wants to set them on fire and means that he’s not allowed to set them fire, not with habit and Lilia’s echoing disapproval like a clamp on his temper. “No. No. And no you fuckers.”

“He said a bad word!” One of them says gleefully.

“You mean fudge,” another reprimands. She looks at Yuri with a tiny human’s disapproval. “Bad words are bad ya know.”

Yuri digs his heels into the floor and refuses to budge.

The shop is more long then wide, the walls a matted wood. Overhead the lighting fixture wheels fluttering paper cranes around and around a pale rose crystal. There are plants stacked in the corners, both leafy green ones and those made from metal, the kind of plants that Yuri remembers seeing in the home of the dwarven folk or the Fairy King’s forest, delicate and artful with tiny unfurling flowers at their tips and light a golden curve along their branches. The human triplets look up at Yuri. Yuri frowns down at them. One of them yanks at the hem of his jacket as another headbutts his knees.

Yuri does not move. Yuri, has, in fact, a truly unfortunate amount of babysitting experience. The fox population isn’t quite as high in the Mountains as it is on Mount Inari, but with good hunting and plenty of nooks and crannies for a warm den in the winter, there are more than enough for Yuri to be swarmed every forsaken spring and summer.

Three huffs come in unison. “Fine.” They turn to the nearest shelf, stacked neatly with glass bottles. Some of the contents are liquid, some of it dry raw ingredients. They come in all colours, pale or dark, fizzling or distorting from one hue to another. “Potions first.”

*  
The brats present the potions in a lecturing, salesmanly fashion.

“Cough fixer.” A finger points. “Cut and burns heal.” Brat one holds up a bark-brown glass of liquid and shakes it. “And the headache one has five different flavours. It’s a buy three for one too!”

Five words into their explanation, all three of them have gathered in front of Yuri in lieu of standing around him like an extremely short barricade. Yuri takes this opportunity of freedom to turn heel and stalk his way deeper inside, tasting the astringent bitterness of dried herbs as he heads towards the back. He should probably leave. The true miracle of the day is that he hasn’t set the brats to smell like burning yet, and already he can hear the indignant squeaks behind him, the small boots battering against the floor. But he’s here, and he wants something for his efforts.

Worst come to worst he can just slap an illusion over the entire store and go hurtle fireballs over the lake. Whatever.

More jars, some chunks of raw crystal and cracked-open geodes humming faintly of power. He stops near a glass case full of paper creatures: birds and fish and fruits with sharp edges like the ones on display by the windows, done in bright heavy paper. There are markings that look like runes drawn in either silver or gold. Dragging one fingernail down the mane of a horse, Yuri can feel the spark, direction and potential, something urging life and motion in the curve of the ground-quartz ink. He lets his own magic sink into the paper. Just a drop, precise as an injection. He’s not quite as good at this as Mila is, can’t rearrange bedrock to golemns or breathe enough fire into his constructs to the point it grows a soul, but something on this scale is easy, all visualisation, glass manes and curious ears and smooth hooves, dark intelligent eyes.

Yuri lets part of his intent sink in and threads part of it through the fibres of the paper. When he takes his palm away the horse shudders, translucent now, the shape of it like before but the texture smooth and hard to the touch instead of pliant, ink markings curling down its legs and head. It tosses back its head, hooves stamping on the shelf. Walks forward three steps and into Yuri’s palm.

“It’s not supposed to do that,” says brat one, as all three of them poke their way in front. “How many cool things do you know?”

“Probably lots,” brat two mutters thoughtfully, notebook out again.

Brat three is still tracking the horse gingerly migrating its way from Yuri’s hand to Yuri’s shoulder, picking its way across the fabric. She looks up and up and cranes her neck, and her nose scrunches a little in contemplation. “Hey what’s your name, big brother?”

“I knew we were forgetting something,” remarks brat one.

“You mean you.”

“I mean we.”

Yuri weighs his options. None of them are exactly great. “Yuri,” he grunts finally.

They try it out. First, the way Yuri says it, not in the rounded vowels of Hasetsu but edged sharp and rough with the rumble of dragon-tongue Yuri grew up with. “Yuri Yuri Yuri.” The syllables are all stretched. Distorted. Flat and wrong. It’s still probably the best he’s going to get coming from human tongues.

“Your accent’s weird,” Brat two contributes, biting down on a thumb. Then she readjusts, and the sounds that come out from her mouth are somehow even more off. “Yuu-ri. Yuuri.”

The other two pick up on it both gleefully and immediately, “Yuuri Yuuri Yuuri!” they chorus.

Yuri’s fingers clench. He can feel the heat in his belly, lava hot and boiling, magma on his breath, fire on at his fingers. “Not like that,” he bites, scrapingly harsh, harsher than anything he’s said yet, and all three brats still as they look up at him.

“…Big brother?”

Breathe in. Breathe out. Lilia’s words: _Remember your fire, Yura._ Remember: they are just kits. They are nothing but human kits. They do not know or understand the courtesies of the land.

The thing is, the last time Yuri had his name this badly mangled, he’d been two hundred years old with barely three tails and he’d set that fucker on fire so fast, they didn’t even have a chance to lunge for the lake. He’d taken their eyes for it. Watched their scales go black and peel off, watched them burn for the disrespect, the taunt, the insolence.

The thing is, names mean something.

Names are important. Names are powerful. They always, always have been. They can be symbols or prophesies or summonings. For foxes, the weight they carry is heavy. Not as heavy as that of the Fae, of course, because names are everything to the fae—their power and their purpose and the core of themselves, learn a faerie’s true name and you can own the whole of them—but still heavy.

Yuri had been born in the intermediate between Winter and Spring. He’d been born a child of fire into a world of snow and melting things, frost on the rocks, the river crusted with a sheen of ice, but green on the tree leaves and the little bare patches of earth. For this, his mother had named him Yuri and in the undertones of magic it meant Fire-melting-ice-to-spring. Growth and renewal. Both the beginning and the end of a cycle. Mila had teased him for it, “such a delicate name for a temper like that!” And Yuri had smashed three of her favourite marble statues into the lake in his offense. It wasn’t the point, anyways. Yuri’s name is neither delicate nor careful. Yuri is the ravaging before the new growth, the forest fire that allows young shoots to poke out from the ashes of their ancestors. Yuri is volcano lava and avalanches; he is change. His mother named him after nature’s inevitable cycles.

He lets his exhale waft out hot, a little heat-shimmer in the air. “Fine,” he says, to their wide eyed faces. “Big-brother is fine.”

A moment for silence, nothing but the fan and the clink-clink-ching of the cash register, and Yuri is beginning to wonder if he actually scared them. Of course, that’s nothing but wishful thinking. All three brats light up at the same time, like Mila after a particularly thorough meal or a particularly thorough victory, chests puffed and smiles wide. “Does that mean you’ll teach us cool things?” they implore.

“No.” Yuri responds, flatly. He tries to reassure himself that there’s no way he’s going to see them after getting the hell out of dodge. He had better not.

“I wanna learn the horse thing,” Brat one says, turning to her sister. “Imagine.”

“But the clothes,” says Brat two.

“But the horse.”

“But the _clooooothes.”_

“Hey isn’t Yuuri here today?” says Brat three, glancing down at her notebook.

Abruptly, the conversation turns.

“Oh yeah!” Brat One grins up at Yuri. “We have a super-duper cool mage too ya know! He’s awesome, even if he’s all water. We’re no good with it.” She pauses to look over Brat Three’s shoulder. “Is he in the back room?”

“Yep,” says Brat three, popping the last syllable.

They look at one another. Some undecipherable agreement passes. Yuri reacts purely on their body language, the shift in their stance, feet spread a little wider, shoulders drawn back, a deep inhale for maximum lung capacity.

He claps his hands over his ears just in time for the scream.

“YUUUUURI!”

From inside: a thump, the screech of a creaky hinge working open. “Yes?” calls Yuuri Katsuki.

*

It’s probably a good thing that the corner they’re in is hidden by the maze of shelving and origami. Otherwise Katsuki probably would have turned heel the moment he saw Yuri and realized there was still distance between them. In any case, he doesn’t, because the sharp turn of the corner obstructs his line of vision, and by the time he’s stepping around, work boots scraping harsh against the wood, the brats have already hurtled themselves onto his legs and latched on in the way of terrible, sticky-fingered octopuses.

He looks down, and sighs. He looks up, sees Yuri, and goes two shades paler.

That is an appropriate reaction. Still, Yuri eyes the hairless monkey in a way that is decidedly judgemental.

“And this is our super-duper water mage,” The brats introduce, tugging at Katsuki’s arms. Not that Yuri needs an introduction to Yuuri Katsuki. Yuri, in fact, needs an anti-introduction. He needs the facts he has absorbed through endless, love-struck repetition to be preferably bleached away. “You’re staying at his family’s hot spring inn right?”

“Yes,” Yuri says shortly. He eyes Katsuki, who has an expression on his face that can be categorized somewhere between bleak and harrowed. “I recognize him.”

“Cool!”

Katsuki smells odd.

He smells like water-mage monkey, of course: sea salt, brine, minerals and wet sand. Overtop there are forest scents, still sharp in their freshness. Also ink and paper, and the bitter-musk fragrance of the herbs present in the shop. But something overtop. Not quite a scent, even. A tingle. A thread of magic just under Katsuki’s skin, floating like film.

Yuri takes a second to recognize it, which is ridiculous, but when he does he can’t un-recognize it. He stares at Katsuki, and all he can think of are horrible, horrible flashbacks to Viktor’s harlequin romance novels, of the high school romance novels scattered across the idiot’s bed. This means that Viktor made contact. This means Viktor did something. This means Viktor did an interaction. Possibly this morning. Definitely in a timeframe of twelve hours.

Yuri _does not want to know._

“Viktor is an idiot,” he informs Katsuki, because this feels like a topic they can both sympathize on.

“Um,” Katsuki says.

“He is such an idiot,” Yuri continues. He’s had no one to vent to for the past month. This is nice, even if Katsuki is ninety percent the cause of Yuri’s current situation. “He’s a fucking mountain of idiocy. I cannot believe him. My biggest mistake was introducing him to your town’s library, just so you know.”

“That’s… nice?” Katsuki edges, unsure.

Yuri stares at him flatly. Really. Really? Yuri is making himself perfectly clear here. What does Katsuki want, an actual invitation?

“You’re supposed to insult him,” he says, because maybe Katsuki is actually that inane. He really hopes not. Yuri has already signed himself up to be in his presence for the next long, long while.

Katsuki looks at him like this is an incomprehensible task of herculean proportions. Yuri sighs, a hiss through his teeth. “Okay. Okay. Let’s go the other way. What did Viktor do, monkey?”

“He didn’t—“ Katsuki says, an automatic refusal to go with the step back, but Yuri’s eyes are on him, narrowed to slits, and the triplets are cementing him to the spot. He pauses. “Are you his brother?” he wonders tentatively, in lieu of answering the question.

“No,” says Yuri. This evading thing is getting annoying. The human brats are taking notes. Yuri is going to strangle Viktor, and possibly Katsuki at this point, but Viktor can probably manage that fine without any intervention from Yuri’s part, and with the force of good intentions alone.

Four pairs of eyes stare at him. Finally, Katsuki caves. “He offered to coach me,” he says, defeated.

“He what.”

He has outdone himself in his stupidity, is Yuri’s first coherent thought, shortly after he’s cycled through a litany of curses in his head. What the fuck. What in the Creator’s name does Viktor think he’s doing? Teaching magic to a human, of all the beings in the universe he can pick. A human. Viktor. Teaching. It’s like a recipe for blowing up the continental crust. Just what exactly is he learning from those novels?

“Is he not good?” Katsuki asks, and his tone is almost hopeful.

Yuri snorts.

“At magic? You couldn’t find someone better if you tried. At teaching?” Yuri thinks back to that one class with Georgi’s brethren. Viktor, curling ocean currents around himself in an underwater typhoon while Yuri watched from the nearby cliffside, looking at the gobsmacked faces of the young sea serpents and cheerily telling them to replicate it, as if it were that simple. And that was with beings holding a foundation of instinctive and high magic theory centuries old, not a human that had barely seen the quarter turn of the century. “Ever heard of ‘Geniuses can’t teach?”

“Well—”

“Geniuses can’t teach.”

Katsuki tugs at his bangs, a nervous movement. “Oh,” he says. Then, quietly: “I should refuse, then” and very abruptly Yuri remembers that he’s supposed to be on Viktor’s side here, and also supposed to be fostering positive interaction.

He grimaces. The things he does, for that oversized pile of marble.

“Don’t.”

Katsuki blinks at him. “Don’t?” he frowns, a sharp downward tug of his lip. All of a sudden it’s like someone’s breathed a backbone into him. The way he stands, tired, but also quietly furious. “I—“

Naturally, Yuri cuts him off. This sudden show in initiative would have been better appreciated, you know, maybe five minutes ago, when Yuri was actively encouraging him to vent about Viktor. Really, what an idiot. “He’s a terrible teacher,” Yuri says, because he’s never been one to sugar-coat anything. “That’s true. But if you can work with his methods, you’ll be learning more than your entire previous education slapped together.”

At least, Yuri hopes so. He does, but frankly, Yuri’s a pessimist at heart.

“And he’ll try,” he tacks on grudgingly. “By the Creator’s name, Viktor will try.”

Viktor never does anything by halves. Never the important things, never the not important things either, and Katsuki, in this case, has firmly allotted himself a high spot in Viktor’s treasury of importance. Viktor will try and try and the problem behind this is that sometimes Viktor will try too hard. Yuri still does not understand; what Viktor sees in this human boy? What does Viktor see behind the blue jacket and the square-frame glasses, what does Viktor the Ice Born, Viktor the Conquerer, Viktor the Charmer, what is it in Katsuki Yuuri’s frame and eyes does Viktor find himself so enthralled by?

He looks at Katsuki. Katsuki looks back, and there’s no magic there, no treasure or secret. He looks fragile and young and ignorant and a little confused. He has three tiny humans sitting on his feet. He in no way looks inspiring.

The things Yuri does.

“Give him a chance.” Yuri says, and he isn’t sure whether he’s talking to Katsuki or to himself. Maybe both. “I don’t understand Viktor. But apparently, apparently, he likes you. He said you inspired him. Believe me, there’s not a fucking lot that can.”

Katsuki pries one of the brats off of his leg and sets her down, motions weary. How futile; one of the others immediately scoot up to take the empty space. “Inspired, huh. Yes, well. I don’t understand Nikiforov either.” his tone is cinder dry. It’s the longest sentence Yuri has heard from him yet.

“He’s an idiot,” Yuri says, because that does in fact explain everything. He looks hard at Katsuki and hopes the monkey’s short term memory isn’t that short.

Katsuki blinks at him. Yuri stares back, hard. Then, in a wary, venturing kind of way, he says, “He… followed me out at practice at five in the morning.”

So Yuri’s peace offering has finally been received. Hallelujah. Perhaps the monkey isn’t as stupid as originally though. “The idiot barricaded my room with market pamphlets.”

A smile curls at the edge of Katsuki’s lip. “He hugged me two seconds after we met.” A pause. “Unless, um, is that a cultural thing? If it is I’m—“

Humans. Yuri rolls his eyes hard enough it’s a miracle they don’t pop out of his skull. “It’s really, really not.” He drawls slowly. “I congratulate you on not trying to bite his fingers off.”

Honestly, having fingers that can be bitten off without the attacker loosing teeth is a novelty for Viktor. Yuri will have to exploit that himself sometime in the future.

For some reason, this gets a laugh out of Katsuki.  He smiles; the edges of his eyes crinkle. “Thanks.”

Yuri thinks of romance novels and scattered paper and the silvery, fevored gleam in Viktor's eyes. “Yeah, don’t thank me yet,” he scoffs. He leans back on the cabinet, glass jarring a little where his shoulder blades press. At Katsuki’s feet the brats are mouthing something like “how many bad words was that” and “who’s Viktor” and honestly, if Katsuki’s going to be stuck to Viktor for the rest his foreseeable future, it’s less of a mercy to offer him the tried-and-true headache counter and more of a necessity. “Repeat after me, monkey: Viktor is an idiot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been sitting half finished on my hard drive for... the past two months. *Puts head to desk* I am so very sorry.
> 
> In any case, the story is back! We've gone back to Yuri for this chapter, whose good mood is ruined again. At some point he's going to strangle Viktor, and then both Yuuri and Yuri’s problems will be solved. I have no idea how this devolved into a "who can insult Viktor more fest" but, well, it was Yurio leading that conversation. 
> 
> Next chapter: Yuuri makes a call and some background checks. Viktor gains an answer. 
> 
> If there's anything you liked in particular (or any grammatical errors caught) please leave me a comment! ;)
> 
> (If I'm not updating come scream at me at: cyancoffeecakes.tumblr.com)


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